I think I'm a part of the first generation of journalists to skip print media entirely, and I've learned a lot these last few years at Forbes. My work has appeared on TVOvermind, IGN, and most importantly, a segment on The Colbert Report at one point. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, write me on Facebook or just email at paultassi(at)gmail(dot)com. I'm also almost finished with my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy.

The Science of Gawker's Nerd Baiting

About seven different people yesterday directed me to this Gizmodo article, in which a young woman, Alyssa Bereznak recounts a horror story she endured attempting to use OKCupid to find an online date. Fair enough, I thought, but this better be one hell of a story to warrant its own Gizmodo post.

She talks about the pains of being a woman on the site, plagued by horrific and crude messages from guys left and right (something many of my female friends can attest to), and finally she settles on a “normal” sounding suitor.

Little did she know, this seemingly cool guy was in fact… A NERD!

Actually, he was nerd royalty. His name was Jon Finkel, and he’s the Magic the Gathering card game champion of the entire world, and a legend of the game who had his own feature in Wired and is now a successful hedge funder. Her reaction after she learned about this aspect of his life?

“At dinner I got straight down to it. Did he still play? “Yes.” Strike one. How often? “I’m preparing for a tournament this weekend.” Strike two. Who did he hang out with? “I’ve met all my best friends through Magic.” Strike three. I smiled and nodded and listened. Eventually I even felt a little bit bad that I didn’t know shit about the game. Here was a guy who had dedicated a good chunk of his life to mastering Magic, on a date with a girl who can barely play Solitaire. This is what happens, I thought, when you leave things out of your online profile.”

In short: “Magic? OMG ew!”

Now, I’m not here to debate about just how shallow of a person Ms. Bereznak is, the internet has lambasted her plenty for this. The fact that people can be superficial or stuck in a high school mindset is not news, as it unfortunately happens every day, even as the stigma of “nerdom” is slowly fading from popular culture as almost everyone likes superheroes and video games these days.

Rather, I want to look at the fact that as of the time I’m writing this, that article has 529,280 views. For those of you lacking a frame of reference, that’s an astonishing number, especially for something a mere 12 short paragraphs long.

I think that Alyssa knew EXACTLY what she was doing when she wrote this post. It’s the tried and true practice of online nerd-baiting in order to get traffic, and this, perhaps more than any other example, shows just how well it works.

People love to hate, and therefore writing a post trashing something people love, or stating an opinion that can so obviously be demolished is clearly bating for traffic. This is a practice I’ve seen across many of the Gawker sites before (Gizmodo being one of them), but this is a whole new level.

The fact that this was published on Gizmodo (the tech blog) rather than say, Jezebel (the snarky female empowerment blog) within the Gawker network speaks volumes about what they were trying to do. Gizmodo’s readership is hugely male, and hugely tech savvy and therefore mostly “nerdy” in the traditional sense. To post something trashing a “geeky” activity like Magic the Gathering would be the equivalent of their video game blog Kotaku writing a post trashing professional eSports. Oh wait, they did that too.

Why does this happen? Why would a woman subject herself to be publicly dragged through the mud by the entire male population of the internet? It’s because the life of a freelancer is based around getting hits, as the more you get, the more you get paid. This is especially true with the notoriously sketchy Gawker pay model, and though I don’t know specific numbers, I can safely say that Alyssa is riding a wave of nerd tears all the way to the bank after this post.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and as a freelancer (and also a nerd myself) I can testify to the temptation to bait. I found myself dipping into such a practice last week by pure accident when I wrote an opinion piece claiming Google Plus wasn’t all that great. My posts don’t usually get more than a few thousand hits, so I figured I might get a few comments here and there disagreeing, but I didn’t anticipate the reaction I got.

That post now sits as my most popular of all time at over 100,000 views, and I spent the next WEEK reading through comments from angry G+ users about how I was wrong and guilty of the type of “nerd baiting” I’m condemning here.

It was genuinely not my intention, and I tried to write a few thoughtful follow-up pieces engaging the community afterwards and people could see I believed in the points I was making. But the fact is, it’s hard to argue with the results, as such tactics clearly do work for getting hits, intentional or not.

So as a freelancer, and as a publisher, you have to ask yourself how much you want to sell your soul in order to bring in page views. I’m sure that was Gizmodo’s highest trafficked day in a long while, but at the cost of most people visiting saying “Wow, how could they have actually published this?” Alyssa might be getting a fat bonus check at the end of the month, but at the cost of having her name permanently etched into the internet as a shallow, mean human being. Was it worth it? I’ll let them decide. All we can do in the future to fight such practices is to ignore them, but from what I’ve seen, we nerds just can’t let things like this slide, and so our anger will continue to be used as currency.

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and man i havnt of jon finkel since i did that whole competive magic stuff years and that jerk beat us all and got his own card. if i remember right he was playing a psychotog deck, which made anybody who played it a jerk back then

I’ve been a fan of Unreality Mag for a while now, and I have to say that I’m really starting to enjoy your articles, good job.

I’m also a huge MTG fan, so this whole situation has been very relevant to my interests. I agree with everything you bring up. I DO think that this was a planned action by Gizmodo, however, I don’t think they realized the extent of how far this would go.

They probably anticipated a hew 100,000 extra hits, angry comments and twitter junk, but this situation has birthed a new meme for god’s sake, Shallow Alyssa (http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/).

I think it would be best for everyone if we just forgot about it and went about our merry nerdy ways. Hopefully 4-Chan won’t be too hard on the poor (misguided) girl.

I think people overestimate the cleverness of bloggers like Ms. Bereznak. Sure, she may have known the post would anger a lot of people and draw a lot of attention and clicks, and she may even benefit financially from this. But do you think this will work out in the long-run for her?

If she ever tries to become a real journalist, a simple employer Google of her name would shut down that aspiration. She’s revealed herself to be devoid of any integrity, and that will in the long term hurt both professional and personal aspirations.

Gawker, on the other hand, IS laughing all the way to the bank on this, at least for now. But is that sustainable? I know plenty of people (myself included) who now refuse to give the Gawker network any traffic. I only read the article after someone posted a screenshot of it.

Gawker has become the cesspool of the Internet, and I just can’t see how anyone who still works there has any remaining self-respect. They no longer do anything resembling journalism and instead just write whatever will draw clicks. It’s pathetic.